Note 15. Masai Ostrich Mating.Note 22. Earth's history.Note 26. Ants...when they fall off a branch, they can maneuver in the air so that, instead of landing on the hostile forest floor, they swoop back to the safety of the tree trunk:

Page 151: Hard problems often yield before science, and though we still don't understand how every complex biochemical system evolved, we are learning more every day. After all, biochemical evolution is a field in still its infancy. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator. When you hear someone claim otherwise, just remember these words of Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

Page 155: True, breeders haven't turned a cat into a dog, and laboratory studies haven't turned a bacterium into an amoeba (although, as we've seen, new bacterial species have arisen in the lab). But it is foolish to think that these are serious objections to natural selection. Big transformations take time-huge spans of it. To really see the power of selection, we must I extrapolate the small changes that selection creates in our lifetime over the millions of years that it has really had to work in nature. We can't see the Grand Canyon getting deeper, either, but gazing into that great abyss, with the Colorado River carving away insensibly below, you learn the most important lesson of Darwinism weak forces operating over long periods of time create large and drama tic change.

Page 164: This conclusion seems simple but required hundreds of hours of tedious fieldwork by inquisitive biologists. Sequencing DNA in a gleaming lab may seem far more glamorous, I but the only way a scientist can tell us how selection acts in nature is to get dirty in the field.

Page 171: This asymmetry between males and females in potential numbers of mates and offspring leads to conflicting interests when it comes time to choose a mate. Males have little to lose by mating with a "substandard" female (say, one who is weak or sickly), because they can easily mate again, and repeatedly. Selection then favors genes that make a male promiscuous, relentlessly trying to mate with nearly any female. (Or anything bearing the slightest resemblance to a female-male sage grouse, for instance, sometimes try to mate with piles of cow manure, and, as we learned earlier. some orchids get pollinated by luring randy male bees to copulate with their petals.)

Females are different. Because of their higher investment in eggs and offspring, their best tactic is to be picky rather than promiscuous. Females must make each opportunity count by choosing the best possible father to fertilize their limited number of eggs. They should therefore inspect potential mates very closely.

Page 176: What does a female have to gain by choosing a particular male? There are two answers. She can benefit directly, that is, by picking a male who will helps her produce more or healthier young during the act of child care. Or she can benefit indirectly, by choosing a male who has better genes than those of other males (that is, genes that will give her offspring a leg up in the next generation). Either way, the evolution of female preferences will be favored by selection-natural selection.

Page 180: Male frogs attract females by giving loud calls, limning summer nights in the southern United States. Studies of captive frogs show that females strongly prefer males whose calls are longer. To test whether those males had better genes, researchers stripped eggs from different females, fertilizing half of each female's eggs in vitro with sperm from long-calling males, and the other half with sperm from short-calling males. The tadpoles from these crosses were then reared to maturity. The results were dramatic. Offspring from long-callers grew faster and survived better as tadpoles, were larger at metamorphosis (the time when tadpoles turn into frogs), and grew faster after metamorphosis. Since male gray tree I frogs make no contribution to offspring except for sperm, females can get no direct benefits from choosing a long-calling male This test strongly suggests that a long call is the sign of a healthy male with good genes, and that females who choose those males produce genetically superior offspring.

Pages 180-181: There is, however, a third explanation for sexual dimorphisms, and it's the simplest of all. It is based on what are called sensory-bias models. These models assume that the evolution of sexual dimorphisms is driven simply by preexisting biases in a female's nervous system. And those biases could be a by-product of natural selection for some function other than finding mates, like finding food. Suppose, for example, that members of a species had evolved a visual preference for red color because that preference helped them locate ripe fruits and berries. If a mutant male appeared with a patch of red on his breast, he might be preferred by females simply because of this preexisting preference. Red males would then have an advantage, and a color dimorphism could evolve. (We assume that red color is disadvantageous in females because it attracts predators.) Alternatively, females may also simply like novel features that somehow stimulate their nervous systems. They may, for example prefer bigger males, males who hold their interest by doing more complex displays, or males who are shaped oddly because they have longer tails. Unlike the models I described earlier, in the sensory-bias model females derive neither direct nor indirect benefits from choosing a particular male.
Pages 187-188: Furthermore, because humans are visual animals, we tend to overlook traits that can't easily be se en, like differences in pheromones that often distinguish species of similar-Iooking insects.And when we think of why we feel that brown-eyed and blue-eyed humans, or Inuit and !Kung, are members of the same species, we realize that it's because they can mate with each other and produce offspring that contain combinations of their genes. In other words, they belong to the same gene pool. When you ponder cryptic species, and variation within humans, you arrive at the notion that species are distinct not merely because they look different, but because there are barriers between them that prevent interbreeding. Ernst Mayr and the Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky were the first to realize this, and in 1942 Mayr proposed a definition of species that has become the gold standard for evolutionary biology. Using the reproductive criterion for species status, Mayr defined a species as a group of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. This definition is known as the biological species concept, or BSC. “Reproductively isolated” simply species have traits-differences in appearance, behavior, or physiology-that prevent them from successfully interbreeding, while members of the same species can interbreed readily.Página 190: But the BSC isn't a foolproof concept. What about organisms that are extinct? They can hardly be tested for reproductive compatibility. So museum curators and paleontologists must resort to traditional appearance-based species concepts, and classify fossils and specimens by their overall similarity. And organisms that don't reproduce sexually, such as bacteria and some fungi, don't fit the criteria of the BSC either. The question of what constitutes a species in such groups is complicated, and we're not even sure that asexual organisms form discrete clusters in the way that sexual ones do.But despite these problems, the biological species concept is still the one that evolutionists prefer when studying speciation, because it gets to e heart of the evolutionary question. Under the BSC, if you can explain how reproductive barriers evolve, you've explained the origin of species.
Pages192-193: In many ways biological speciation resembles the "speciation" of two closely related languages from a common ancestor (an example is German and English, two "sister tongues")…During biological speciation, populations change genetically to the extent that their members no longer recognize each other as mates, or their genes can't cooperate to produce a fertile individual Likewise, languages can diverge to the extent that they become mutually unintelligible: English speakers don't automatically ¡;understand German and vice versa. Languages are like biological species in that they occur in discrete groups rather than as a continuum: the speech of any given person can usually be placed unambiguously in one of the several thousand human languages. The parallel goes even further. The evolution of languages can be traced back to the distant past, and a family tree drawn up, by cataloging _the similarities of words and grammar. This is very like reconstructing an evolutionary tree of organisms from reading the DNA code of their I genes. We can also reconstruct proto-Ianguages, or ancestral tongues, by looking at the features that descendant languages have in common. This is precisely the way biologists predict what missing links or ancestral genes should look like. And the origin of languages is accidental: people don't start to speak in different tongues just to be different. New languages, like new species, form as a by-product of other processes, as in the transformation of Latin to Italian in Italy. The analogies between speciation and languages was first drawn by-who else?-Darwin, in The Origin. But we shouldn't push this analogy too faro unlike species, languages can "cross-fertilize," adopting phrases from each other, like the English use of the German angst and kindergarten. Steven Pinker describes other striking similarities and differences between the diversification of languages and species in his engrossing book The Language Instinct.
Page 198: The way we discovered how species arise resembles the way astronomers discovered how stars "evolve" over time. Both processes occur too slowly for us to see them happening over our Lifetime. But we can still understand how they work by finding snapshots of the process at different evolutionary stages and putting these snapshots together into a conceptual movie. For stars, astronomers saw dispersed clouds of matter ("star nurseries") in galaxies.

Page 199: And so it is with speciation. We see geographically isolated populations running the gamut from those showing no reproductive isolation, through those having increasing degrees of reproductive isolation ¡(as the populations become isolated for longer periods), and, finally, complete speciation. We see young species, descended from a common ancestor, on either side of geographic barriers like rivers or the Isthmus of Panama, and on different islands of an archipelago. Putting all this .together, we conclude that isolated populations diverge, and that when that divergence has gone on for a sufficiently long time, reproductive barriers develop as a by-product of evolution.
Page 209: Since Dart's time, paleoanthropologists, geneticists, and molecule biologists have used fossils and DNA sequences to establish our place in the tree of evolution. We are apes descended from other apes, an< our closest cousin is the chimpanzee, whose ancestors diverged from our own several million years ago in Africa. These are indisputable facts. And rather than diminishing our humanity, they should produce satisfaction and wonder, for they connect us to all organisms, the living and the dead.
Page 215: Our main question is, of course, to determine the pattern of human evolution. When do we see the earliest fossils that might represent our ancestors who had already diverged from other apes? Which of our hominin relatives went extil1ct, and which were our direct ancestors? How did the features of the ancestral ape become those of modern humans? Did our big brain evolve first, or our upright posture? We know that humans began evolving in Africa, but what part of our evolution happened elsewhere?
Page 225: What happened? There are two theories. The first, called the "multiregional" theory, proposes an evolutionary replacement: H. erectus (and perhaps H. neanderthalensis) simply evolved into H. sapiens independently in several areas, perhaps because natural selection was acting in the same way all over Asia, Europe, and Africa.

The second idea, dubbed the "out of Africa" theory proposes that modern H. sapiens originated in Africa and spread, physically replacing H. erectus and the Neanderthals, perhaps by outcompeting them for food or killing them.
Pages 226-227: Looking at the whole array of bones, then, what do we have? Clear and indisputable evidence for human evolution from ape-like ancestors. Granted, we can't yet trace out a continuous lineage from an ape-like early hominin to modern Horno sapiens. The fossils are scattered in time and space, a series of dots yet to be genealogically connected. And we may never have enough fossils to join them. But if you put those dots in chronological order, as in figure 24, you see exactly what Darwin predicted: fossils that start off ape-like and become more and more like modern humans as time passes. It's a fact that our divergence from the ancestor of chimps occurred in East or Central Africa about seven million years ago, and that bipedal walking evolved well before the evolution of large brains. We know that during much of hominin evolution, several species existed at the same time, and sometimes at the same place. Given the small population size of humans and the improbability of their fossilization (remember, this usually requires that a body find its way into water and be quickly covered with sediment), it's amazing that we have as good a record as we do. It seems impossible to survey the fossils we have, or look at figure 25, and deny that humans have evolved.

Page 229: Yet these mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve. Even without fossils, we have evidence of human evolution from comparative anatomy, embryology, our vestigial traits, and even biogeography. We've learned of our fishlike embryos, our dead genes, our transitory fetal coat of hair, and our poor design, all testifying to our origins. The fossil record is really just the icing on the cake.

Page 230-231: But recent work shows that our genetic resemblance to our evolutionary cousins is not quite as close as we thought. Consider this. A 1.5 percent difference in protein sequence means that when we line up the same protein (say, hemoglobin) of humans and chimps, on average we'll see a difference at just one out of every 100 amino acids. But proteins are typically composed of several hundred amino acids. So a 1.5 percent difference in a protein 300 amino acids long translates into about four differences in the total protein sequence. (To use an analogy, if you change only 1 percent of the letters on this page, you will alter far more than 1 percent of the sentences.) That oft-quoted 1.5 percent difference between ourselves and chimps, then, is really larger than it looks: a lot more than 1.5 percent of our proteins will differ by at least one amino acid from the sequence in chimps. And since proteins are essential for building and maintaining our bodies, a single difference can have substantial effects. Now that we've finally sequenced the genomes of both chimp and human, we can see directly that more than 80 percent of all the proteins shared by the two species differ in at least one amino acid. Since our genomes have about 25,000 protein-making genes, that translates to a difference in the sequence of more than 20,000 of them. That's not a trivial divergence. Obviously, more than a few genes distinguish us. And molecular evolutionists have recently found that humans and chimps differ not only in the sequence of genes, but also in the presence of genes. More than 6 percent of gene s found in humans simply aren't found in any form in chimpanzees. There are over 1,400 novel genes expressed in humans but not in chimps. We also differ from chimps in the number of copies of many gene s that we do share. The salivary enzyme amylase, for example, acts in the mouth to break down starch into digestible sugar. Chimps have but a single copy of the gene, while individual humans have between two and sixteen, with an average of six copies. This difference probably resulted from natural selection to help us digest our food, as the ancestral human diet was probably much richer in starch than that of fruit-eating apes.Page 232: Races (also called "subspecies" or "ecotypes") are simply populations of a species that are both ¡ geographically separated and differ genetically in one or more traits. There are plenty of animal and plant races, inc1uding those mouse populations that differ only in coat color, sparrow populations that differ in size and song, and plant races that differ in the shape of their leaves. Following this definition, Homo sapiens c1early does have races. And the fact that we do is just another indication that humans don't differ from other evolved species.

Pages 234-235: Some racial differences give us clear evidence of evolutionary pressures that acted in different areas, and can be useful in medicine. Sickle-cell anemia, for example, is most common in blacks whose ancestors came from equatorial Africa. Because carriers of the sickle-cell mutation have some resistance to falciparium malaria (the deadliest form of the disease), it's likely that the high frequency of this mutation in African and African-derived populations resulted from natural selection in response to malaria. Tay-Sachs disease is a fatal genetic disorder that is common among both Ashkenazi Jews and the Cajuns of Louisiana, probably reaching high frequencies via genetic drift in small ancestral populations. Knowing one's ethnicity is a tremendous help in diagnosing these and other genetically based diseases. Moreover, the differences in allele frequencies between racial groups mea n that finding appropriate organ donors, which requires a match between several "compatibility genes," should take race into account.

Some of these differences make sense as adaptations to the different environments in which early humans found themselves. The darker skin of tropical groups probably provides protection from intense ultraviolet light that produces lethal melanomas, while the pale skin of higher latitude groups allows penetration of light necessary for the synthesis of essential vitamin D, which helps prevent rickets and tuberculosis.52 But what about the eye folds of Asians, or the longer noses of Caucasians? . These don't have any obvious connection to the environment. For some biologists, the existence of greater variation between races in genes that affect physical appearance, something easily assessed by potential mates, points to one thing: sexual selection. Apart from the characteristic pattern of genetic variation, there are other grounds for considering sexual selection as a strong driving force for the evolution of races. We are unique among species for having .developed complex cultures. Language has given us a remarkable ability to disseminate ideas and opinions. A group of humans can change their culture much faster than they can evolve genetically. But the cultural change can also produce genetic change. Imagine that a spreading idea or fad involves the preferred appearance of one's mate. An empress in Asia, for example, might have a penchant for men with straight black hair and almond-shaped eyes. By creating a fashion, her preference spreads culturally to all her female subjects, and, lo and behold, over time the curly-haired and round-eyed individuals will be largely replaced by individuals with straight black hair and almond-shaped eyes. It is this "gene-culture coevolution" -the idea that a change in cultural environment leads to new types of selection on genes-that makes the idea of sexual selection for physical differences especially appealing. Moreover, sexual selection can often act incredibly fast, making it an ideal candidate for driving the rapid evolutionary differentiation of physical traits that occurred since the most recent migration of our ancestors from Africa. Of course, all this is just speculation, and nearly impossible to test, but it potentially explains certain puzzling differences between groups.

Page 236: As the psychologist Steven Pinker noted, "If you adopt children from a technologically undeveloped part of the world, they will fit in to modern society just fine." That suggests, at least, that races don't show big innate differences in behavior.

My guess-and this is just informed speculation-is that human races are too young to have evolved important differences in intellect and behavior. Nor is there any reason to think that natural or sexual selection has favored this sort of difference. In the next chapter we'll learn about I the many "universal" behaviors seen in all human societies-behaviors like symbolic language, childhood fear of strangers, envy, gossip, and gift-giving. If these universal s have any genetic basis, their presence in I every society adds additional weight to the view that evolution hasn't l produced substantial psychological divergence among human groups.Although certain traits like skin color and hair type have diverged among populations, then, these appear to be special cases, driven by I environmental differences between localities or by sexual selection for I external appearance. The DNA data shows that, overall, gene tic differences among human populations are minor. It's more than a soothing platitude to say that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin. And, that's just what we'd expect given the brief evolutionary span since our most recent origin in Africa.

Pages 238-239: The evolution of lactose tolerance is another splendid example of gene-culture coevolution. A purely cultural change (the raising of cows, perhaps for meat) produced a new evolutionary opportunity: the ability ~ to use those cows for milk. Given the sudden availability of a rich new source of food, ancestors possessing the tolerance gene must have had I a substantial reproductive advantage over those carrying the intolerant gene. In fact, we can calculate this advantage by observing how fast the 1: tolerance gene increased to the frequencies seen in modern populations. , It turns out that tolerant individuals must have produced, on average, I 4 to 10 percent more offspring than those who were intolerant. That is pretty strong selection.

Anybody who teaches human evolution is inevitably asked: Are we still evolving? The examples of lactose tolerance and duplication of the amylase gene show that selection has certainly acted within the last few thousand years. But what about right now? It's hard to give a good answer. Certainly many types of selection that challenged our ancestors no longer apply: improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and medical care have done away with many diseases and conditions that killed our ancestors, removing potent sources of natural selection. As the British geneticist Steve Jones notes, 500 years ago a British infant had only 50 percent chance of surviving to reproductive age, a figure that has now risen to 99 percent. And for those who do survive, medical intervention has allowed many to lead normal lives who would have been ruthlessly culled by selection over most of our evolutionary history. How many people with bad eyes, or bad teeth, unable to hunt or chew, would have perished on the African savanna? (I would certainly have been among the unfit.) How many of us have had infections that, without antibiotics, would have killed us? It's likely that, due to cultural change, we are going downhill genetically in many ways. That is, genes that once were detrimental are no longer so bad (we can compensate for "bad" genes with a simple pair of eyeglasses or a good dentist), and these genes can persist in populations.Conversely, genes that were once useful may, due to cultural change, now have destructive effects. Our love of sweets and fats, for example, may well have been adaptive in our ancestors, for whom such treats were a valuable but rare source of energy.54 But these once rare foods are now readily available, and so our gene tic heritage brings us tooth decay, obesity, and heart problems. Too, our tendency to lay on fat from rich food may also have been adaptive during times when variation in local food abundance produced a feast-or-famine situation, giving a selective advantage to those who were able to store up calories for lean times. Does this mean that we're really de-evolving? To some degree, yes, but we're probably also becoming more adapted to modern environments that create new types of selection.

Online resources:http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/evolution.htm A good (albeit slightly outdated) depiction and description of the various stages of human evolution. http://www.darwin-online.org.uk/ The complete work of Charles Darwin online. IncIudes not only all of his books (incIuding all six editions of The Origin), but also his scientific papers. You can find many of Darwin's personal letters at the Darwin Correspondence Project: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/homehttp://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoEvidence.html large website collecting various lines of evidence for evolution. http://www.gate.net/~rwms/crebuttals.html website that examines and thoroughly debunks many creationist claims. http://ncse.com/ An online set of resources assembled by the National Center for Science Education, an organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in America's public schools. It gives updates on ongoing battles with creationism, and includes links to many other sites. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/ A large Web site inspired by the PBS series Evolution, this contains a large selection of resources for both students and teachers, including the history of evolutionary thought, the evidence for evolution, and theological and philosophical issues. The sections on human evolution are particularly good. http://pandasthumb.org/ The Panda's Thumb Web site (named after a famous essay by Stephen Jay Gould) deals with recent discoveries in evolutionary biology as well as ongoing opposition to evolution in America. http://www.talkorigins.org/ A comprehensive online guide to all aspects of evolution. Included within it is the best online guide to the evidence for evolution, at http:/www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/.Among many good blogs on evolutionary biology, two stand out. One is "Laelaps" (http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/ & http://brianswitek.com/), the blog of Britan Switek, a graduate student in paleontology at Rutgers, which covers not only paleontology but also broader issues in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science. The other is "This Week in Evolution:' the blog of Cornell professor R. Ford Denison, at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/thisweekinevolution/ It presents new discoveries in evolutionary biology and is accessible to anyone who has had a college-Ievel course in biology.

Berkeley, California—The Open Science Summit, which wrapped up on Saturday evening, seesawed between egalitarian and libertarian impulses. The more egalitarian faction of open science advocates want free intellectual property and free subscriptions to scientific journals. The more libertarian bloc focused on the freedom to research and plans for alternative ways to finance that research. Despite their disparate views, the summiteers do have in common a brewing rebellion against the strictures imposed by the reigning academic-government-corporate research complex. The summit covered a wide range of topics, so I will take brief looks at various aspects that particularly struck me. Let’s start with more libertarian-leaning proposals, specifically, the freedom to research and microfinancing of research.

Freedom to Research

Jason Bobe, the co-founder of the DIYBio.org, described it as a “community that wants to turn biotechnology into a hobby.” Bobe is also the director of community for the Personal Genome Project founded by Harvard biologist George Church, which aims to boost genomic research by recruiting thousands of volunteers who will make their genetic and medical information available to researchers. (Disclosure: I have applied.) Bobe illustrated what he called the “emergence of bio-natives” by citing cases such as the 2005 instance where a 15-year-old boy used genetic testing to trace his sperm donor dad. More recently, two New York City high school students found that 25 percent of the sushi whose genes they tested wasn’t as advertised. Trailing behind these sushi citizen scientists, academic researchers later confirmed their results. Bobe also pointed to the advent of biohacker community labs in Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Regarding the BioCurious community lab (slogan: “Experiment with friends”) near San Francisco, biohacker Tito Jankowski argued that such labs are the future of science, the future of creativity, and the future of curiosity. Jankowski and colleagues founded Pearl Biotech which makes and sells relatively inexpensive open hardware scientific equipment such as an electrophoresis gel box and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) thermocycler. The thermocycler amplifies DNA samples and the gel box separates out DNA molecules for identification. Jankowski showcased a short video in which an experimenter in the garage lab was figuring out compounds to kill metastatic ovarian cancer cells.

Computer technologist and dining room biohacker Meredith Patterson clad in a full length black leather coat recited a rousing rendition of the Biopunk Manifesto (explicitly modeled on the Cypherpunk Manifesto). Favorite lines include: “The lawmakers who wish to curtail individual freedom of inquiry do so out of ignorance and its evil twin, fear—the natural prey and the natural predator of scientific investigation, respectively. If we can prevail against the former, we will dispel the latter.” The manifesto further declares: “We assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one's own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion.” And another is: “We reject outright the admonishments of the precautionary principle, which is nothing more than a paternalistic attempt to silence researchers by inspiring fear of the unknown.”

Bioinformatics guru Raymond McCauley described a citizen scientist DIYGenomics project that he and some friends are putting together. Their question: Do vitamins work for me? In this case, his fellow DIY bio enthusiasts are using their genotype scanning test results from 23andMe to focus on the effects of variants in the MTHFR gene that are associated with higher levels of the amino acid homocysteine in blood plasma. Higher homocysteine levels correlate with greater risk of cardiovascular disease, among other conditions. The question McCauley and friends want to explore is how do homocysteine levels respond to various vitamin regimens? A trial run of five participants found that the activated version of folic acid (vitamin B9) reduced the homocysteine levels of subject #2. Subject #2 is McCauley. McCauley sees what he is doing as a kind of crowd-sourced clinical trial. (Disclosure: I have volunteered to participate in the follow-on DIY research.)

Microfinancing Research

The summit devoted one panel to three non-profit groups that are trying to provide private funding to early career researchers: Fund Science, Sciflies, and the Eureka Fund. The federal government dispenses billions every year for research, but very little trickles down to projects originated by younger scientists. The average age for receiving a first National Institutes of Health grant is 42. Inspired by the popular Kiva microlending site, these funds offer researchers grants in the thousands of dollars. The Sciflies project will enable researchers to post their proposals online with the goal of attracting contributions from individual donors. Although the Sciflies site is at the “pre-Beta” stage, eventually donors will be able to choose a category of research and then scan through a list of projects that might interest them. Sciflies has hired a journalist to turn proposals into readable prose. No money will be disbursed until a project has been fully funded. All three funds are about a year old, so it is far from proven that this kind of microfinancing of research will be successful.

Patent Trolling

On the more egalitarian side, the summit featured a panel of scholars who really, really hate gene patents. The panel included Australian National University law professor Luigi Palombi, University of Delft (Netherlands) philosopher David Koepsell, and New York University law professor Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss. Their main objection is that patents are supposed to be granted only to novel inventions whereas genes are natural substances. The mere purification of a natural substance is not patentable, they argue.

The anti-gene patent narrative features a villain, Myriad Genetics. Myriad developed and has been peddling a test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 breast cancer genes. Women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene variants have a 60 percent risk of breast cancer during their lifetimes (normal risk is about 12 percent). Myriad reportedly charges more than $4,000 for the test. In March, a federal district court accepted the argument made by the American Civil Liberties Union that genes are natural substances that are not patentable and ruled that Myriad’s patent was invalid. Myriad is appealing this verdict.

Whatever one may think about the patentability of genes, the crucial question is, do such patents hurt or help innovation? ”My theory is that intellectual property is interfering significantly in the innovation process,” asserted Palombi. But is he right? Numerous studies have so far failed to find that gene patents are a big impediment to either research or innovation.

Keith Bergelt, the CEO of the Open Invention Network, argued that the increase in “patent trolls” is becoming a big problem for innovators. Bergelt described the Open Invention Network as an intellectual property company that defends against patent trolls by acquiring and sharing patents related to the open source Linux computer operating system. The pejorative term “patent troll” refers to groups that acquire potentially useful patents, wait for someone to independently develop and create a market for the patented technology, then emerge to claim infringement and demand payment. One of the more recent high profile cases involved Research In Motion, the maker of Blackberry wireless devices, which paid more than $600 million for infringing wireless communication patents owned by NTP, Inc., the privately-held intellectual property firm based in Richmond, Virginia. In July, NTP announced new infringement suits against Apple, Google, HTC, Microsoft, and Motorola over email patents. Bergelt asserted that patent trolls have invested more than $6 billion to aggregate patents for which they lie in wait for the unwary to develop into successful products.

Open Access to Research Journals

The Right to Research Coalition, a student lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., wants Congress to mandate that access to research funded by taxpayers be free to everyone. The ebullient Nick Shockey, who manages the student group under the aegis of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, detailed a hearing last week about mandating access before the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives.

Two years ago, the National Institutes of Health required that all its grantees make their research publicly available 12 months after it appears in a scientific journal. In one of the more clueless comments made at the hearing, one member of Congress worried that providing free access to journals would amount to giving away our country’s intellectual property to foreign competitors. A lobbyist for journal publishers apparently argued that mandating open access would destroy American jobs. The coalition favors the passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act which would extend the NIH policy to 11 other government agencies that fund research and shorten the embargo time from 12 to 6 months. “You can’t build on cutting edge science if you don’t know where the cutting edge is,” quipped Shockey.

Cheap Drugs for Poor People

Nobody, egalitarians and libertarians alike, showed much love for Big Pharma. One of the concerns is that the current model of drug development means that drug companies must focus on developing pharmaceuticals that they can later sell for high prices. High prices mean that poor people can’t get access to life saving treatments. To overcome this problem Aiden Hollis described the Health Impact Fund (HIF) proposal [pdf]. The proposal would offer drug companies a choice between seeking to recoup their investments using high prices as usual or registering their drugs with the HIF, which would require the firm to sell its product worldwide at an administered price near the average cost of production and distribution. The company would be compensated by a stream of payments based on the assessed global health impact of its drug. The HIF would be funded by governments to the tune of about $6 billion annually. James Love of Knowledge Ecology International wants to accomplish much the same thing by offering big prizes to the developers of medicines that aim to treat diseases rife in developing countries such as malaria, TB, and HIV. He would fund his prizes through a one percent tax on pharmaceutical sales which would raise about $4 billion annually in the U.S.

Many of the summiteers are oddly unaware of the role that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation plays in creating high drug prices. For example, a PR consultant for the summit argued that the chief problem is that Big Pharma and Big Finance want to protect their unconscionable profits by crushing the nascent biotech open science movement. Perhaps so, but what summiteers miss is why this particular dysfunctional business ecosystem exists. Three letters: FDA. As annoying as the FDA regulators are to Big Pharma, the truth is that FDA regulation creates a huge barrier to entry for any new competing firm. This means that start-up biotechs have no chance of getting any therapeutic product approved since it takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get it past the hypercautious FDA.

A contrast with the IT industry is instructive. With information technology, a company develops a cool product, runs it out the door, and makes billions (or flops quickly). In biotech and pharmaceuticals, a company can’t do that. Developers of new treatments have to run an expensive and time consuming regulatory gauntlet before they can sell a single pill or shot. I suspect that if the information technology industry was regulated by the FDA we would still be using 50-lb. IBM 5100 “portable” computers costing over $80,000 in today’s dollars.

The foregoing is a taste of the smorgasbord of topics offered at the summit. Others included how do academic researchers get credit for open source contributions, how cure entrepreneurs are reshaping the research enterprise to focus on the development of new treatments, how open source biotechnology can enhance biosecurity, and how open source drug discovery can advance innovation. The summit wrapped up this weekend, having made a slight bit of progress toward its stated goal of organizing the various sub-communities of the Open Science Movement into an effective global force for rapid change in science and innovation policy. It’s a start.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Why? Because if private companies don't do things efficiently, they lose money and die. Unlike government, they cannot compel payment through the power to tax.

In 1995, a private road company added two lanes in the middle of California Highway 91, right where the median strip used to be. It then used "congestion pricing" to let some drivers pay to speed past rush-hour traffic. Using the principles of supply and demand, road operators charge higher tolls at times of day when demand is high. That encourages those who are most in a hurry to pay for what they need. It was the first time anywhere in the world that congestion pricing was used. Bureaucrats were skeptical. Now congestion pricing is a hot idea for both private and public road management systems.

It's Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous" order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing. The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings—to pedestrians and other cars—rather than just to signs and signals. It demonstrates the "Peltzman Effect" (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.

ARTÍCULO:

In Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity, I bet my readers $1,000 that they couldn't name one thing that government does better than the private sector.

I am yet to pay.

Free enterprise does everything better.

Why? Because if private companies don't do things efficiently, they lose money and die. Unlike government, they cannot compel payment through the power to tax.

Even when a private company operates a public facility under contract to government, it must perform. If it doesn't, it will be "fired"—its contract won't be renewed. Government is never fired.

Contracting out to private enterprise isn't the same thing as letting fully competitive free markets operate, but it still works better than government.

Roads are one example. Politicians call road management a "public good" that "government must control." Nonsense.

In 1995, a private road company added two lanes in the middle of California Highway 91, right where the median strip used to be. It then used "congestion pricing" to let some drivers pay to speed past rush-hour traffic. Using the principles of supply and demand, road operators charge higher tolls at times of day when demand is high. That encourages those who are most in a hurry to pay for what they need. It was the first time anywhere in the world that congestion pricing was used. Bureaucrats were skeptical. Now congestion pricing is a hot idea for both private and public road management systems.

Likewise, for years there was a gap in the ring road surrounding Paris that created huge traffic problems. Then private developers made an unsolicited proposal to build a $2 billion toll tunnel in exchange for a 70-year lease to run it. They built a double-decker tunnel that fits six lanes of traffic in the space usually required for just two. The tunnel's profit-seeking owners have an incentive to keep traffic moving. They collect tolls based on congestion pricing, and tolls are collected electronically, so cars don't have to stop. The tunnel operators clear accidents quickly. Most are detected within 10 seconds -- thanks to 350 cameras inside the tunnel. The private road has cut a 45-minute trip to 10 minutes.

Indiana used to lose money on its toll road. Then Gov. Mitch Daniels leased it to private developers. Now it makes a profit. The new owners spent $40 million on electronic tolling. That's saved them 55 percent on toll collection. They saved $20 per mile by switching to a better de-icing fluid. They bought a new fleet of computerized snowplows that clear roads using less salt. Drivers win, and taxpayers win.

It also turns out that government roads often run more smoothly when drivers have more, not less, freedom.

This sounds paradoxical. Politicians often sneer at libertarians, saying, "You want to get rid of traffic lights?!" Well, yes, actually. In some cases, traffic moves better and more safely when government removes traffic lights, stop signs, even curbs.

It's Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous" order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing. The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings—to pedestrians and other cars—rather than just to signs and signals. It demonstrates the "Peltzman Effect" (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.

In Drachten, Holland, lights and signs were removed from an intersection handling about 30,000 cars a day. Average waiting times dropped from 50 seconds to less than 30 seconds. Accidents dropped from an average of eight per year to just one.

On Kensington High Street in London, after pedestrian railing and other traffic markers were removed, accidents dropped by 44 percent.

"What these signs are doing is treating the driver as if they were an idiot," says traffic architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie. "If you do so, drivers exhibit no intelligence."

Once again, freedom and responsibility triumph.

John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.